Stories They Tell Martin, Sarah E; Rawlins, Jacob D
Journal of business and technical communication,
10/2018, Letnik:
32, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This study investigates the themes that drive persuasive recruiting appeals, or stories, designed to attract new, entrepreneurial workers in the direct selling industry. It offers a rhetorical ...perspective informed by fantasy theme analysis on the themes present in the recruiting content on the corporate Web sites of three direct selling companies (Mary Kay, Stella & Dot, and Scentsy). The analysis indicates that rhetorical agency is a core theme in the persuasive recruiting stories for these companies. Offering a means for business and technical communication scholars to explore agency or other persuasive story themes in context, this study addresses how a rhetorical perspective is useful to assess recruiting appeals in shifting, entrepreneurial work contexts.
This study intends to examine the entrepreneurial process of individual direct sellers from the perspective of entrepreneurial marketing, and adopts the process method where events in chronological ...order are scrutinized. This study collects data from triangular sources and combines the focus group interviews with in-depth interviews to examine 14 direct sellers selected from one domestic, and one foreign direct selling brand, respectively. We develop a dynamic model of entrepreneurial marketing. The results show that two relational management mechanisms are crucial to the successful transformation towards the next entrepreneurial phase. The findings not only fill the academic gap in individual-level direct-selling strategy, but also shed light on entrepreneurial marketing theory by providing insights regarding how resources and initiatives are modified, which deepens the understanding of its dynamicity. Moreover, this research extends the transaction oriented Western studies on direct selling to the ‘quanxi’(Relationship) oriented Eastern context that especially values relational network. In practices, the findings could assist direct sellers and interpersonal-oriented micro-entrepreneurs to develop personal business tactics, and serve as references for direct selling companies to plan for training program of brand affiliates (BA) and brand representatives (BR).
The increased usage and proliferation of businesses entering the gig economy has meant more employment options for individuals wishing to participate in the gig economy. However, not all gig ...employment opportunities are the same. Typically, gig employment opportunities fall into one of two categories: the sharing economy or direct selling. These two types of gig employment are unique in the perceptions of those that choose to engage in them. This research seeks to provide insights into the drivers of gig worker perceptions of the product, organizational trust, job outcome status and satisfaction. Results suggest that direct sales workers have higher levels of self-congruence, and lower levels of perceived commerciality, leading to positive evaluations of the product offered, organizational trust and job satisfaction. Conversely, sharing economy workers have much lower levels of self-congruence, and higher levels of perceived commerciality, leading to a more complicated relationship with the outcome variables.
This article examines the work identities of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the direct selling industry, an alternative work arrangement in which they selling branded products and recruit others ...to join them as sales consultants. Drawing on qualitative research with undocumented direct sellers in Philadelphia, this research shows that direct selling pays in meaningful work and new identities, rather than in wages. While existing research documents the importance of hard worker identities for undocumented immigrants coping with structural marginality, undocumented direct sellers believe their work offers autonomy, education, and geographic mobility. Ultimately, multi-level marketing companies profit from undocumented workers' precarity by promising freedom from work and from the struggles of enduring illegality.
Research summary
Research documents the performance effects of attending to shareholders and treating employees well but underplays national differences in the relative power of labor and capital. We ...advance a configurational perspective that acknowledges the fit between stakeholder engagement, context, firm attributes and performance. As a cornerstone of this perspective, we develop a typology of stakeholder engagement strategies expressing how firms navigate the tension between conforming with local expectations—by prioritizing shareholders or employees, according to context—and being distinctive—by diverging from their peers. Analyzing a cross‐national sample of firms from 2004 to 2011, we identify combinations of engagement strategies, firm attributes, and contexts linked to high performance. Our findings highlight the multiple context‐dependent paths, which link stakeholder engagement to high firm performance.
Managerial summary
How do firms navigate pressures from shareholders and employees across different institutional environments? We develop a typology of stakeholder engagement strategies based on how firms in different countries strike a balance between conformity (i.e., prioritizing locally important stakeholders) and differentiation (i.e., prioritizing stakeholders that their local peers might neglect). Our findings show that the engagement strategies associated with high performance vary according to local institutional context and firm characteristics. In particular, by not merely prioritizing stakeholders who are already locally important, firms can use stakeholder engagement to differentiate themselves from their peers, and such engagement strategies are often linked to high performance.
While prior research studied the impact of information sharing on competition in the supply chain assumes suppliers adopt same selling channels, we contribute to this research by analyzing public and ...private information sharing under three types of supply chain structures. This paper considers two scenarios including public–public information sharing and public–private information sharing. In each scenario, competing suppliers can sell products in one of three types of supply chain structures including indirect–direct channel structure, indirect–indirect channel structure, and direct–direct channel structure. Using a game-theoretic framework, we get the profits of suppliers under two scenarios and compare the expected profits under different scenarios to analyze the impact of public information sharing and private information sharing on the competition. By comparing the profits of suppliers under different channel structures, we get the existence conditions of each channel structure. We show our key findings as follows. Interestingly, we find that public information sharing enhances supply chain competition and conversely, private information sharing mitigates supply chain competition. This finding suggests that suppliers can use private information sharing as a tool to increase competitive capability in channel competition. We also find that the supplier with low-quality products is willing to share private quality information when the products’ quality difference is low. A surprising finding is that private information sharing achieves a win–lose outcome, where one supplier earns a higher profit compared to public information sharing whereas another supplier earns a lower profit. In addition, only under the public–private information sharing scenario can suppliers adopt the indirect–direct channel structure.
•Private information sharing mitigates channel competition.•Public information sharing enhances channel competition.•Private information sharing achieves a win–lose outcome.•Private information sharing impacts suppliers’ selection of selling channel.
In this paper, a novel three-dimensional (3D) space-time-frequency (STF) non-stationary geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) is proposed for the sixth generation (6G) terahertz (THz) wireless ...communication systems. The proposed THz channel model is very general having the capability to capture different channel characteristics in multiple THz application scenarios such as indoor scenarios, device-to-device (D2D) communications, ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications, and long traveling paths of users. Also, the generality of the proposed channel model is demonstrated by the fact that it can easily be reduced to different simplified channel models to fit specific scenarios by properly adjusting model parameters. The proposed general channel model takes into consideration the non-stationarities in space, time, and frequency domains caused by ultra-massive MIMO, long traveling paths, and large bandwidths of THz communications, respectively. Statistical properties of the proposed general THz channel model are investigated. The accuracy and generality of the proposed channel model are verified by comparing the simulation results of the relative angle spread and root mean square (RMS) delay spread with corresponding channel measurements.
In this article, we propose a three-dimensional (3D) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channel model for air-to-ground (A2G) communications in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) environments, where the UAV ...transmitter and ground receiver are in motion in the air and on the ground, respectively. A novel angular estimation algorithm is proposed to estimate the real-time azimuth angle of departure (AAoD), elevation angle of departure (EAoD), azimuth angle of arrival (AAoA), and elevation angle of arrival (EAoA) based on the non-stationary nature of the channel model. In the model, we investigate the time-varying spatial cross-correlation functions (CCFs) and temporal auto-correlation functions (ACFs) with respect to the different moving directions and velocities of the UAV transmitter and ground receiver. Furthermore, we derive and study the Doppler power spectral densities (PSDs) and power delay profiles (PDPs) of the proposed channel model. Numerical results show that characteristics of the proposed channel model are very close to those of practical measurements, which provide a new and practical approach to evaluate the performance of next generation UAV-MIMO communication systems.
This paper presents the design of a novel adaptive event-triggered control method based on the heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) technique for nonlinear discrete-time systems with unknown system ...dynamics. In the proposed method, the control law is only updated when the event-triggered condition is violated. Compared with the periodic updates in the traditional adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) control, the proposed method can reduce the computation and transmission cost. An actor-critic framework is used to learn the optimal event-triggered control law and the value function. Furthermore, a model network is designed to estimate the system state vector. The main contribution of this paper is to design a new trigger threshold for discrete-time systems. A detailed Lyapunov stability analysis shows that our proposed event-triggered controller can asymptotically stabilize the discrete-time systems. Finally, we test our method on two different discrete-time systems, and the simulation results are included.
This paper presents 3-D vehicle massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna array model for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication environments. A spherical wavefront is assumed in the ...proposed model instead of the plane wavefront assumption used in the conventional MIMO channel model. Using the proposed V2V channel model, we first derive the closed-form expressions for the joint and marginal probability density functions of the angle of departure at the transmitter and angle of arrival at the receiver in the azimuth and elevation planes. We additionally analyze the time and frequency cross-correlation functions for different propagation paths. In the proposed model, we derive the expression of the Doppler spectrum due to the relative motion between the mobile transmitter and mobile receiver. The results show that the proposed 3-D channel model is in close agreement with previously reported results, thereby validating the generalization of the proposed model.
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